Recommended Citation

February 23, 2000
The following article by Wade Huntley, Nautilus Program Director for
Global Security, and Peter Hayes, Executive Director, is included in the
special issue on "East Timor, Indonesia and the World System," of the
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
(http://csf.colorado.edu/bcas/index.html) Volume 31, Nos. 1 and 2.
For earlier NAPSNet Special Reports on East Timor, please visit:
http://www.nautilus.org/napsnet/sr/East_Timor/index.html
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East Timor and Asian Security
Wade Huntley and Peter Hayes1
The recent crisis in East Timor, sparked by the August 30, 1999, vote for
independence and culminating in the introduction of the UN-sanctioned
International Force for East Timor (InterFET), is not simply the latest
chapter in East Timor's tragic history. The bloodshed and turmoil in
East Timor have cast in stark relief the utter inadequacy of existing
Asia-Pacific security arrangements to cope with regional crises, let
alone enduring challenges. Moreover, the world's most recent brush with
"ethnic cleansing" highlights the increasing importance of vital
questions concerning the relationship of international security and human
rights in the post-Cold War world.
US Responsibility
Although important questions remain concerning lines of authority in East
Timor and in Indonesia, there is little doubt now that primary
responsibility for the killings of innocent civilians in East Timor in
the wake of the referendum must be borne by the Indonesian military and
the militia forces it sanctioned and supported. Nevertheless, to fully
appreciate the nature of the international reaction to the crisis, it is
also vital to highlight the history of international culpability in
Indonesian repression in East Timor.
The principal bearer of such broader responsibility is the United States,
which for decades has consistently prioritized its perceived national
interest in resisting popular activism and preserving stability in
Indonesia. Following this approach, the United States turned a blind eye
to the massacre of Indonesians in 1965-66, signaling its willingness to
tolerate the Indonesian military's gross abuse of international human
rights standards. Accordingly, the United States tacitly accepted and
surreptitiously supported Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor
following the end of Portuguese colonial rule. Although not explicitly
condoning the invasion, Washington worked behind the scenes to subvert
any meaningful United Nations efforts to restrain Indonesian bloodletting
in the territory. Subsequent to this de facto validation of the
invasion, the United States not only willingly overlooked a quarter-
century of harsh Indonesian rule, but also effectively abetted this
repression by helping arm and train Indonesian forces and by resisting
efforts to focus international concern on the plight of East Timor's
people. US reluctance to support UN preparations to prevent post-
referendum violence is only the most recent example of this complicity.
As the post-referendum crisis unfolded, many US commentators stressed
Indonesia's strategic importance to U.S. national interests. Yet many
frequently cited factors, such as the strategic importance of Indonesian-
controlled sea lanes, oil in the region, and the position of Indonesia as
a middle-ranking power in the region, are simply artifice. For example,
arguments based on the importance of the Malacca and/or Lombok Straits
ignore the relative ease and small cost of using alternate sea lanes
around Australia should turmoil in Indonesia lead to the closing of these
routes.2 Reliance on such justifications worked only to undermine US
credibility among the Timorese and their supporters elsewhere in the
region.
Some arguments as to the need for US caution in approaching this crisis
do, however, have validity. In particular, there is a basis for the
assertion that the United States has lost some of its capacity to
exercise leverage over the players in Indonesia and East Timor, despite
the apparent increase of its strategic capabilities. For example, long-
standing intimate relations between US and Indonesian armed forces have
waned of late. Although the Indonesian military continues to regard this
relationship as symbolically important, its practical value has
diminished. Ironically, each severed tie (such as the cessation of joint
training exercises one week before the referendum) left one less tie that
the United States could threaten to cut to coerce behavior it desired.
Thus, the Clinton administration's suspension of all military contact
with Indonesia (eventually exercised over Pentagon objections) may have
had much less impact than many asserted on the final decision to allow
the peacekeeping force to enter East Timor and to pull out Indonesian
troops.
At the economic level, Indonesia is dependent upon the United States and
Japan for over US$1 billion per month in credit from the IMF, World Bank
and Asian Development Bank issued after the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
This circumstance provided the United States and Japan with considerable
leverage. However, this leverage was not easy to utilize as a policy
instrument. The Indonesian military, directly responsible for the
violent suppression of East Timor, would have been among the least
affected segments of Indonesian society by a cutoff of this support.
During the killing in September, therefore, neither the threat nor the
implementation of an aid cutoff was as coercive of Indonesia's military
leadership as many predicted. Indeed, wholesale economic penalization
would have punished the country's civilian population for the actions of
its military, regardless of the attitude most Indonesian citizens held on
those actions. In the longer run, wielding this powerful but crude
weapon risked undermining Indonesian economic recovery, increasing
poverty, bankruptcy, and social stress, and making it even more difficult
for the Indonesian political elite to accept moves toward democracy.
This reality continues to reduce rather than expand American power over
the Indonesian military's behavior in West Timor or elsewhere in
Indonesia's far flung provinces.
Despite these limitations on US power, however, events have demonstrated
that the United States sets the tone for the course of events in
Indonesia and elsewhere in the region. Although initially reluctant to
directly intervene in East Timor, President Clinton was forced to focus
on the crisis at the APEC meeting in New Zealand, at which time Australia
and other states held their strongest leverage on the United States to
support an international peacekeeping force. Even in acquiescing to
pressure from both domestic and international opinion, the Clinton
administration issued only tepid criticism of Indonesian complicity in
pre- and post-referendum violence. Nevertheless, following Clinton's
direct criticisms, Indonesia quickly accepted an international force for
East Timor, demonstrating its continuing sensitivity to US views. The
international presence that has since taken shape under UN-mandate, which
includes Australian and Korean troops, an offer of Chinese police, and a
humanitarian deployment of the Japanese Air Self Defense Force in West
Timor, certainly bears a US stamp of approval.
Two conclusions follow from these observations. First, although the
exercise of US power in this instance was complicated, opportunities
nevertheless existed for judicious and targeted action in support of the
people of East Timor. For this reason, justifications of inaction on
grounds that inadequate means of influence existed were as specious as
justifications putting Indonesian stability ahead of the future of East
Timor in US national interests.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the continuing centrality of the
United States to the outcome of the crisis exposed the abject inability
of other states in the region to act in concert to play this role
themselves. What has happened--and what will occur--in East Timor will
have lasting effects on the course of security structures in the East
Asia and Pacific region. The course of events is likely to raise the
acceptable performance standard for Asian militaries with respect to
gross violations of human rights. In this regard, developments have
added to the post-Kosovo precedents concerning justifications for
humanitarian intervention and hence are already globally relevant.
The absence of a pre-existing regional security apparatus capable of
reacting quickly and effectively to the emerging crisis has already
imposed costs on all the relevant actors, including the United States,
Indonesia, and especially the people of East Timor. The ad-hoc cobbling
together of the Australia-led multinational force, while a significant
first in achieving broad regional commitment of personnel and funds, has
not rectified this shortcoming.
Collective Regional Security -- ASEAN and the UN
As the violence in East Timor unfolded in the hours and days immediately
following the referendum vote, it became apparent that forceful and
speedy intervention to stop the killing was absolutely urgent. However,
there was no international consensus on its form nor on how to implement
it.
At the time, some argued that first responsibility properly belonged to
the ASEAN member states, and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). Walden
Bello, for example, called upon ASEAN to move "immediately" to form the
core of a UN peacekeeping mission.3 Viewing US and Australian complicity
with past repression of East Timor as too great a stain to be
whitewashed, Bello asserted, "All commitments of armed peacekeepers to
East Timor must be done under the mandate of the UN and ASEAN."
Although the force ultimately deployed received a UN mandate, the ASEAN
states -- as a group or, for the most part, individually -- proved
incapable of taking on a meaningful leadership roles. As Richard Tanter
argued at the onset of the crisis, the ARF "has made no contribution to
resolving the East Timor conflict in the past, and has little to offer
now."4 Unlike Europe with its tried and tested institutions for conflict
avoidance and resolution, he argued, ARF has never addressed the
violation of human rights as an interstate agenda item. Instead, the ARF
and ASEAN set precedents earlier in relation to Burma that kept the
standards of respect for human rights low rather than pushing them toward
international norms. The non-governmental Council for Security
Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP) process that parallels the ARF
also has failed to address these issues. Thus, the region lacks basic
institutions and procedures to address systematic governmental human
rights abuses, especially when they arise in connection with "internal
security" problems.
Subsequent events proved the accuracy of Tanter's diagnosis. As days
passed, initiative to form a peacekeeping force fell by default to
Australia and, behind it, the United States. Despite Indonesia's
expressed desire for more active involvement by Asian neighbors other
than Australia, those states proved fractious and contentious. Malaysia,
despite its active role in past UN peacekeeping operations, reacted
ambivalently as the crisis unfolded, and ultimately bowed out of
InterFET's first phase of deployment in a pique after UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan offered Thailand the role of second-in-command behind
Australia. Thailand's own involvement has been a source of domestic
tension, pitting its activist foreign minister Surin Pitsuwan against
more traditional military and defense elites, and thus muddling somewhat
the signal sent by Thailand's involvement. Although the Philippines has
made a substantial troop commitment to InterFET, it too has blurred its
message by joining China in opposing the UN Human Rights Commission vote
to conduct an international inquiry into the East Timor situation.
In sum, ASEAN member states, individually and collectively, reacted to
the crisis with contradiction and paralysis. A principal source of these
vacillating postures was the resistance to pressures for action given by
the prevailing norm among these states proscribing "interference in the
internal affairs of other member states." Inaction and inertia were
reinforced by the weakness of pre-existing mechanisms for policy
coordination and joint action. Additionally, all these states -- like the
United States -- have been historically very reluctant to endanger vital
economic, political, and security relations with large and oil-rich
Indonesia for the sake of opposing human rights abuses in small and poor
East Timor.
The prospective consequences of ASEAN inaction are sweeping. The call to
place an effective international peacekeeping force in East Timor
presented the ARF with an opportunity to establish a future role for
itself in resolving security dilemmas and other tensions in the region.
The total inability of the ARF to seize this opportunity effectively
ceded leadership to the United States, Australia, other allies and
friends, and the large powers at the UN. Moreover, this inability also
ended any notion that the ARF has political leadership in regional
security dialogues, in relation either to Southeast Asia or to the Asia-
Pacific region as a whole. In short, the ARF's capacity to function as
the fulcrum for regional security coordination and dialogue has been
crippled, and it is unlikely that the ARF or nascent regional
institutions will regain any major role in security deliberations or
outcomes in the near future. With no other meaningful autonomous
security institutions on the horizon, the path is again clear for big
powers to contend for hegemony in the region.
Hegemonic Regional Security -- The Role of Australia
In addition to the US role in the East Timor crisis, the role taken up by
Australia also compels attention. In particular, the crisis presented a
specific opportunity for Australian prime minister John Howard to
redefine Australia's historic approach to Indonesian relations in ways
that will have significant impact on Australia's foreign policy and on
regional security relations for years to come.
Ever since the fall of Singapore to Japan in 1942 demonstrated the limits
of British security guarantees, Australia has faced a tension between its
Western origins and its Asian geography. In foreign policy, this tension
has meant seeking to balance ongoing links to Britain and the United
States, on the one hand, and developing links to immediate neighbors, on
the other. In this context, Australia's relations with Indonesia -- with
its large population and abundant resources -- has been a central
challenge to Australian policy-makers.
After the pro-Western Suharto regime took power in the mid-1960s,
Australian policy-makers worked (with varying success) to maintain close
ties to the regime, helping ameliorate Australia's underlying foreign
policy tension at least with respect to Indonesia. In this context,
Indonesia's occupation and repressive rule of East Timor was an unwelcome
irritation. Although the Whitlam government condemned the invasion and
Australia became home to many East Timorese independence activists,
policy-makers then and after retained their perception of the importance
of sustaining close ties to Jakarta.
Beginning in 1983, the Labour governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating
increased efforts to improve Indonesia-Australia ties, and sought
specifically to build ties to the Indonesian military. These efforts led
in 1985 to Australia's formal recognition of East Timor's incorporation
within Indonesia, and culminated with the December 1995 signing of the
"Agreement on Maintaining Security" (AMS). The AMS, negotiated in secret
and insulated from parliamentary oversight, sparked controversy.
Supporters heralded the agreement for strengthening Australia's
relationship to its most powerful neighbor, with beneficial effects for
relations throughout the Asian region. Critics -- including opposition
leader John Howard -- condemned wording in the AMS widely understood to
oblige Australia to refrain from pressuring Indonesia on East Timor and
other irredentist issues.
Within months of reaching the AMS accord, Australia's Labour Party lost
power in national elections, and Liberal Party leader John Howard became
prime minister. Although initially the new government affirmed support
for the AMS, this approach vied with the party's historical aversion to
Asian-oriented foreign policy. As time passed, rising turmoil in
Indonesia -- the impact of the Asian financial crisis and the
subsequent fall of the Suharto regime -- eroded perceptions of
Indonesia's powerful position, engendering instead the specter of a
disintegrating or "Balkanizing" region and raising questions as to the
wisdom of emphasizing close ties to Jarkata.5 Thus, the brewing crisis
in East Timor presented Howard with a welcome opportunity for a dramatic
break from his predecessors' approaches to relations with Indonesia.
With Indonesian President B. J. Habibie inching toward concessions on
East Timor, the Howard government decided to press the issue. On January
12, 1999, the Australian government proclaimed support for autonomy and
an eventual vote on self-determination in East Timor, abrogating the
implicit proscription entailed by the AMS.6 Only fifteen days later,
Habibie made his historic announcement that the East Timorese would be
allowed to vote to choose, in effect, between autonomy and independence.
The Indonesian military's direct responsibility for the subsequent
violence in East Timor demonstrated its rejection of Habibie's
acquiescence to some form of East Timorese self-determination. Hence,
the Howard government's decision to pressure Habibie on East Timor has
met with criticism for failing to anticipate -- and perhaps even
facilitating -- the Indonesian military's predictable response.
However, the Howard government's motivations for pressing the issue at
this time reached beyond East Timor itself. The deteriorating situation
in East Timor also offered the Howard government an opportunity to put
into action its pro-Western vision of Australia's future regional role,
by adopting a more forceful position toward Indonesia and positioning
Australia to play a prominent role in resolving the situation.
As violence in the province spread, and as previously-cultivated ties to
the Indonesian military proved ineffective as a tool to induce its
restraint, Australia became an early and active advocate of UN
intervention. In the wake of the August 30 vote (in which 78% supported
independence), the murderous and destructive rampage of TNI-supported
pro-integrationist militias made immediate action paramount. In this
context, with no coherent regional security structure in place to offer
credible alternative authority, the UN Security Council approved the
formation of InterFET under Australian leadership.
The broader opportunity and mandate with which the Howard government has
viewed Australia's role in InterFET became clear with Howard's September
enunciation of a new strategic doctrine. Howard's vision would have
Australia not only adopt a more "active" role in Asian security matters,
but do so as a "deputy" to the United States and a broader agenda of
Western-oriented interests. The approach, quickly dubbed the "Howard
Doctrine," clearly casts Australia's InterFET role not as a unique
necessity, but as a model for the future. The doctrinal shift was
accompanied by predictable calls for substantial increases in Australian
defense spending to match the new activist role.
Some commentators have remarked that the "Howard Doctrine" represents a
dramatic new orientation in Australia's approach to regional security
relations. This observation holds only in regard to the extent to which
the approach dispenses with efforts to accommodate Indonesia. In terms
of the projected affinity with the United States, the approach taps a
deep vein of thinking that has existed in Australia since the end of
World War II. As the Cold War dawned, Australian defense planners sought
specific security guarantees from the United States. Because the 1951
ANZUS treaty only partly satisfied these aims, many analysts have since
avowed that Australian "loyalty" to the United States, both in the Asia-
Pacific and elsewhere in the world, would cement an affinity of interests
that would secure US support in time of crisis. Howard's offer to have
Australia act as "deputy" in the region (while the United States acts,
presumably, as "sheriff" to the world) is simply the latest incarnation
of this long-standing ambition among Australia's most pro-Western defense
thinkers.
The Howard Doctrine, then, is an effort to take advantage of the crisis
in East Timor to move away from reliance on collective security
mechanisms and adopt a more militaristic and hegemonic role in regional
security relations, with US backing. As a security policy for Australia,
the deepest flaw in this approach remains what it has always been: US
and Australian interests are not always convergent, and are not made more
convergent merely by Australian fidelity. In the mid-1980s, when New
Zealand's anti-nuclear policy threatened US nuclear weapons postures
throughout the Asia-Pacific, Pentagon decision-makers did not hesitate to
jettison New Zealand as an ANZUS partner. In 1999, the Howard Doctrine
rests on the assumption that the United States will not subject Australia
to a similar fate.
Such an assumption is enormously risky. Anti-Australian sentiment and
violence has emerged throughout Indonesia, and relations with Australia's
other northern neighbors have suffered. If the intervention in East
Timor leads to direct conflict with the Indonesian military or indirect
sparring via the militia, then the operation in East Timor could bring
out instability orchestrated from Jakarta on the Irian Jaya-Papua New
Guinea border -- Australia's worst military nightmare in many respects.
In such a deteriorating relationship, the United States would have some
very difficult choices to make between Jakarta and Canberra. There is no
guarantee that the sheriff would support the deputy. Hence, for
Australia, the East Timor situation is now extremely delicate and
dangerous.
Conversely, successful cooperation between the Indonesian military and
InterFET's forces to disband militias and repatriate refugees from West
Timor could allow Australia the option of reconstructing its relationship
with Jakarta in more positive ways. Such success would also work to
reinforce the Howard Doctrine's premise of a de facto division of labor
between Australia and the United States, wherein Australia would lead
interventions into small hot spots threatening regional instability,
while the United States would involve itself supportively and less
overtly. Developing such a relationship might also help Australia push
the United States to pay its UN dues, now in massive arrears and
threatening the United Nations with bankruptcy. The InterFET
intervention in East Timor gives Australia leverage on the United States
for the first time, as Australia risks picking up a multi-billion-dollar
tab for the cost of UN peacekeeping forces and administration over the
coming years.
Nevertheless, even this more successful realization of the Howard
Doctrine bodes ill for regional security outlooks more broadly. The
deputization of Australia will do little to relieve the onus of US
hegemony that will inevitably follow heavy-handed unilateral actions in
response to regional security turmoil. Instead, an aggressive proxy
relationship of this nature is likely to aggravate Australia's relations
with its immediate neighbors for years to come and undermine efforts to
build genuine collective security mechanisms in the region. Only if
Australia can parlay its self-defined role as US deputy into a lever
capable of inducing greater active US support for building such
mechanisms -- a very big "if" -- will the Howard Doctrine prove to be
a positive contribution to regional peace and security.
Conclusion: The Imperative of Intervention
The need to end the reign of terror over the people of East Timor
provided the strongest justification for constitution of InterFET. The
imperative for intervention, in terms of the threat to human life and the
social fabric of East Timor, was striking and clear.
The political clarity and potency of this imperative, in the face of
traditional appeals to sterile definitions of national interest,
highlights a critical new feature emerging throughout international
relations: the pivotal role that can be played by civil society armed
with new technologies of communication. The presence of many non-
Indonesian witnesses to events in East Timor, including international
civilians, activist groups and UN officials, made it impossible to
conceal the massacres being directed from Jakarta. Access by independent
eye witnesses to instantaneous communication media -- cell phones,
satellite transmissions, Internet-based networking -- made it possible to
generate widespread public awareness and conviction in "real-time;" that
is, while such sweeping consensus could still make a difference. Appeals
to abstract conceptions of security interest could not stand up to the
force of sheer awareness of the underlying human realities. Public
opinion forced the hands of the leaders of the great powers, who would
have preferred to turn a blind eye to these realities and walk away from
their consequences.
The importance of the role played by civil society and communication
technologies is a new complexity characterizing the post-Cold War world.7
Policymakers' choices are not quite so simple as they once were. The
United States, in particular, can no longer simply trade off its
commitment to promoting human rights for maintenance of its own security.
Rather, these are now inextricable elements of a common problem. In the
post-Cold War era, world politics is no longer easily segregated into
"high" and "low" spheres, within the former of which only "hard
interests" are relevant. Today, the human and civil rights status of
individuals and groups at every level of political organization has
become the most vital issue infusing international security throughout
the world. Balancing justifications for humanitarian international
action and respect for national sovereignty now presents the most vexing
questions for contemporary international law.
In this sense, the crisis in East Timor is archetypical of the future.
As international crises rooted in humanitarian concerns increasingly
arise -- as they inevitably will -- concerned individuals will play ever-
greater roles in bringing brutal realities to international audiences.
Capable powers must then be prepared to react very rapidly in ways that
maximize international support if they are to satisfy both the
humanitarian imperatives and security challenges such crises will pose.
Unfortunately, tens of thousands of East Timorese have had to pay with
their lives for this lesson to be learned.
__________
The Nautilus Institute has responded to the urgent crisis in East Timor
by compiling unique assessments and analyses by key experts from
throughout the world, in an effort to promote and broaden debate over
appropriate responses to the crisis. Many of these analyses were produced
specifically for the Nautilus Institute. Between September 7 and October
25, 1999, the Nautilus Institute distributed over a dozen analyses, press
releases and media overviews through the Northeast Asia Peace and
Security Network (NAPSNet); links to this material can be found online at
http://www.nautilus.org/napsnet/sr/East_Timor/index.html. The institute
will continue to solicit and disseminate analyses and sponsor related
activities as long as the crisis continues. We welcome all responses to
this endeavor.
1 Lyuba Zarsky, Tim Savage and Jason Hunter also contributed
indispensably to the conception and argument of this article.
2 John Noer and David Gregory, Chokepoints: Maritime Economic Concerns
in Southeast Asia, Center for Naval Analyses, National Defense University
Press, Washington DC, 1996.
3 See Walden Bello, "East Timor: An ASEAN-UN Solution," NAPSNet Special
Report 10, September 10, 1999, published at:
http://www.nautilus.org/napsnet/sr/East_Timor/index.html
4 Richard Tanter, "The East Timor Disaster," NAPSNet Special Report 1,
September 7, 1999, published at:
http://www.nautilus.org/napsnet/sr/East_Timor/index.html.
5 James Cotton, "East Timor and Australia: Twenty-five years of the
policy debate," NAPSNet Special Report 18, September 21, 1999, published
at: http://www.nautilus.org/napsnet/sr/East_Timor/index.html.
6 This announcement included revelation that Howard had written to
Habibie the preceding December 19, urging support of this course of
action.
7 See the essays on-line at http://www.infoaxioms.org, a study site
maintained by the Nautilus Institute on the impact of new information
technology on US foreign policy making.